About a year ago, a friend of mine was coming off maternity leave – and contemplating her professional future. She is an experienced marketer, with copy-writing, design, and web experience.

She appreciated the security that a full time position provides, but dreaded the thought of being away from her little one for extended periods during the day. She felt that the flexibility of contract work, could provide the best of both worlds: income the family required, while providing a completely flexible schedule.

She began using local and online classified ads to connect with prospective clients, but quickly discovered the limitations of these tools. Most of the connections she made led to dead ends, but not until she’d invested several hours exploring the opportunity. Many of these posts were spam, unprofessional, or most frequently: they severely underestimated her rates. Or more accurately, they severely underestimated the market rate of the services that they were looking for. Likely not coincidentally, given they would often intentionally defer any talk of money “Oh yes, we’ll pay a fair market rate”. I must confess, I am interested to hear if they ever did find a marketer with 10 years experience running dynamic campaigns willing to work on contract for $20 per hour.

After talking about her experiences, it became clear that she could use a service like FindContractWork.com. A middleman, that can help her connect to quality employers – without reducing her margins.

And with that, FindContactWork.com was born.

What has your experience finding contract work in Vancouver been like?

Freelancer’s across Canada can finally breathe a sigh of relief – tax season is over. Tax season is stressful for everyone, but more so for those that are responsible for putting their own money aside for the tax man. Few of us are responsible enough to save for the inevitable April tax bill.

As hard as it is to do, putting money aside from every invoice will save you stress – and keep your spending in check. Open a high interest savings account, and earn a few extra bucks while you’re at it.

Starting a business can seem overwhelming. Tax implications, GST, PST, HST, business registration, domain registration, payroll, etc etc – and this is assuming that you’ve already worked out the most challenging parts: a good idea, and a solid business plan.

Luckily there are many resources out there to help Canadians through the process. For those living in British Columbia (BC) Smallbusinessbc.ca is a great place to start. They have numerous articles and checklists to help position your business for success.

In the coming weeks, we’ll help point you to some of the articles we’ve found invaluable.

As of January 2011, the self employed in Canada now have access to some of the employment special benefits that were previously only available to wage earning or salaried employees. This includes maternity benefits, parental benefits, sickness benefits and compassionate care benefits.

Full details can on eligibility, coverage and how to apply can be found here.